The Rhythm in Everything

A hip-hop pioneer reinvents late-night music.

Questlove grew up in a show-business family. One critic says, “His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless.”Credit Art by Kehinde Wiley

Downtown Nashville on an early June morning, nine o’clock, and Ahmir Khalib (Questlove) Thompson was waiting, as usual, for D’Angelo. He stood in front of the Loews Vanderbilt hotel in a rumpled black hoodie and black sweatpants, bobbing nervously from leg to leg. Oversized and onion-bellied, with steeply raked eyebrows and a wild tangle of beard, he could look as sly and as fierce as the genie in an Arabian tale. But he was tired this morning and feeling deflated. His head, usually surmounted by a large Afro, like a champagne cork, was demurely capped with braids and a do-rag. His body was slumped at the shoulders and baggy at the hips. He looked less like a genie than the bottle it had escaped from. “This was supposed to be so great,” he said. “It was supposed to be this magical moment for everyone. But right now I’m stressed.”

Beside him, under the carport, the other members of the Roots were strung out along the curb in various stages of bedragglement. They’d flown in the night before from New York after taping an episode of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” where they’re the house band, and would fly out again the next morning, after an eighteen-hour workday. Yesterday, they’d recorded an arrangement of “Call Me Maybe” for kazoo and assorted kids’ instruments. (The video has been viewed more than eleven million times on YouTube.) Today, they would play in front of fifty thousand people at Bonnaroo, the mammoth Southern music festival. “It’s been a long week,” the guitarist, Captain Kirk Douglas, told me, peering bleary-eyed from behind his shades. Then he smirked and added, “Month, year . . . life.”

The Roots have one of the stranger careers in popular music. They’re a hip-hop band that plays instruments, social activists in an age of gangsta rap, outsider artists who occasionally appear on Nickelodeon. Talk-show bands tend to be anonymous tribes, thrown together solely for the show. What style they possess is mostly a matter of demographics: soul on David Letterman, jazz on Jay Leno, rock on Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O’Brien. “It’s not a music show,” Paul Shaffer, the leader of the Letterman band, told me. “We do our best to pretend that it’s a music show. But they’re called talk shows, after all.” The Roots have upended this tradition. They were a band long before Fallon, and continue to tour and record. (Their fifteenth album, tentatively titled “. . . And Then You Shoot Your Cousin,” will be out next fall.) They’ve been called the greatest hip-hop band in the world—“Aren’t we, like, the only one?” Questlove says—but on any given night they may play heavy metal or gut-bucket country, progressive jazz or psychedelia. They’ve made music the main event of the show.

When Jimmy Fallon first floated the idea of hiring them, four years ago, the reaction ranged from skepticism to disbelief. “I thought, This is some bullshit,” the Roots’ manager, Richard Nichols, told me. He didn’t return Fallon’s call for three months. Executives at NBC, meanwhile, worried that the band—especially Tariq Trotter, the group’s m.c., who goes by the name Black Thought—would be too “urban” for the show’s audience. “They were, like, ‘Do we need the rapper? What is the rapper going to do?’ ” Fallon told me. “They were just saying ‘rapper’ because they didn’t want to say ‘Black Thought.’ It was not an easy sell for a white guy talking to a bunch of white guys.”

They needn’t have worried. The show now has the highest ratings in its time slot and was nominated for two Emmy Awards this year. What the network didn’t realize was that Questlove, the group’s drummer and musical director, had grown up in show business and made a lifelong study of it. “You have to bear in mind that he’s one of the smartest motherfuckers on the planet,” the critic Robert Christgau told me. “His musical knowledge, for all practical purposes, is limitless.”

What Questlove didn’t realize was how well television would suit him. For most musicians, the hermetic world of a talk show—with all its rules and repeated formulas—would be intolerable. For Questlove, now forty-one, it has come as a relief. He has spent most of his life as a perfectionist among brilliant screwups, a human metronome among artists who can’t tell the time, a black man in a society that has often had little use for one. His nickname began as a play on the words “question mark” but now reads as something more unguarded: a search for affection. The Fallon show has given him the audience he wanted in a strictly controlled environment, with some of the world’s best musicians as playmates. It’s when he goes outside that he runs into trouble.

D’Angelo, for instance. Bonnaroo was supposed to be the singer’s comeback concert—his first show on an American stage in twelve years, with the Roots and an all-star band backing him up. Questlove had scheduled an eight-hour rehearsal that afternoon, to go over the set list. But D’Angelo was stuck in Los Angeles, and rumor had it that he’d missed five straight planes. On a scale of one to a hundred, Questlove said, his “relief factor” was negative three. “I’m a person that’s organized,” he said. “I want to prep it, rehearse it. The whole joy of doing it is that it’s planned.” He shook his head. “You don’t see it, but right now there are a bunch of infrared beams on my forehead.”

A white van pulled up and the band piled in, Questlove in front and the others in back: Kirk Douglas, the keyboardist James Poyser, the percussionist Frank Knuckles, and the bassist Mark Kelley. (Tariq and the horn player, Tuba Gooding, Jr., would join them later that day.) We headed down Interstate 24 toward Manchester, Tennessee, an hour to the southeast, where Bonnaroo’s unwashed hordes awaited. As the band debated where to get breakfast—McDonald’s? “Eww!” Chick-fil-A? “Yes!”—Questlove brooded on the day ahead.

He and D’Angelo had been through this before. A soul singer of rare polish and verve, once hailed as the second coming of Marvin Gaye, D’Angelo is a fitful, reluctant performer. In the eighteen years since he and Questlove first met, the Roots have released fourteen albums, and D’Angelo has released only two. The second, “Voodoo,” featured Questlove as the drummer and unofficial “co-pilot,” as he puts it. It débuted at No. 1 in 2000, stayed on the charts for more than thirty weeks, and won two Grammy Awards. Rolling Stone later called it “the decade’s most magnificent R. & B. record . . . so far ahead of its time that it still sounds radical.”

But that was more than a decade ago. In the years since, D’Angelo fell prey to stagefright, drug addiction, and self-image issues—“some Kate Moss shit,” as Questlove later put it. He dropped out of sight for a while, vowing, as Questlove recently told GQ, to “go in the woods, drink some hooch, grow a beard, and get fat.” He resurfaced in 2005, when he was arrested for drunk driving and charged with possession of marijuana and cocaine. In the mug shots from that night, D’Angelo looked as if he’d followed through on his plan. Later that year, he was in the news again, when he flipped his car on a road in Virginia, breaking a few of the ribs on his left side. It would be five more years before he made it through rehab, sorted out his business affairs, and got back to work.

“D is better than all of us,” Questlove said. “I’m looking at six- or seven-year-old kids—at the potential Ahmirs who are forty years younger than I am. He should be their hero. He should be their idol. This should be his ninth album, and he should be on posters on their walls. I want him to be that guy. I’m, like, ‘You can do it! You can do it!’ But it takes a lot out of me. It’s like that scene in ‘Good Will Hunting,’ when Ben Affleck tells Matt Damon, ‘Yo, if you’re still living next door and working construction in twenty years, I’m going to kick your ass.’ ”

Last year, when D’Angelo and Questlove finally returned to the studio, they fell back into their old habits from “Voodoo,” which took three years to record. “Usually, we’d agree to meet at midnight, but D wouldn’t get there till three,” Questlove told me. “Then it would take two hours for him to commit to a groove. He would do something brilliant for ten minutes and just throw it out. Then he’d do something really brilliant for fifteen minutes and throw that out, too. The stuff he threw away would have been a career highlight for anyone else. He’s forever insatiable. Usually, by seven in the morning he’s like, ‘This is the one!’ And I’m like . . .” He hung his arms at his sides and let his jaw go slack.

It wasn’t as though Questlove had time to spare. He was rehearsing for the Fallon show by day and recording a new Roots album by night. He was co-hosting a standup-comedy show, working as a d.j., and starting a catering service called Quest Loves Food. He was playing tribute concerts at Lincoln Center and at the Apollo, curating “Shuffle Culture” shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and recording albums with a steady stream of artists. (Rolling Stone recently called him “America’s bandleader.”) Working with D’Angelo often allowed him only hour-long naps, and after a while his body began to break down. “My skin starts falling off my hands, like someone stuck them in Elmer’s glue,” he said. “Then it starts falling off my feet. Then my hands start feeling like they’re four hundred and fifty degrees. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. So I go to the hospital, and I’m sitting there in the emergency room, and this nurse—she looks just like Esther Rolle, from ‘Good Times’—she tells me to come over. She says, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ And I say, ‘The skin is peeling off my hands, it’s peeling off my feet, and my hands are burning!’ And, I swear to God, she looks at me just like my grandmother used to—like I’m the scum of the earth. She looks me straight in the face, and she says, ‘Syphilis.’ ”

As it turned out, he had something more exotic: Coxsackie virus, which can cause the human equivalent of hoof-and-mouth disease. It was probably brought on by exhaustion and stress, his doctor said, and the only real treatment was rest. Questlove had been worried about his health for a while. His father had had multiple heart attacks—the most recent in June—and his own weight had ballooned as high as four hundred and forty pounds. Twenty years ago, he said, hip-hop artists used to worry about getting gunned down at a night club. Now they’re dying of strokes and diabetes. “We’re the first generation not to go to bed starving—the first luxury generation of overindulgence. That’s why we’re the size we are.” So Questlove began a new regimen. He swore off soul food—“The beautiful taste of death,” he calls it—and hired a personal chef and a trainer, a yoga instructor, a Shiatsu masseuse, and a lymphatic-massage therapist, in addition to his psychotherapist. “I’m in a tax bracket now where I can afford to have a Greek chorus of health people follow me around,” he said. “I’m watched by health Nazis everywhere.”

By the time Questlove came to Nashville, he had lost forty pounds and had beaten back the virus. He even had a girlfriend—the first in a while. But he was still waiting for D’Angelo. The singer had recorded more than thirty tracks for his next album but couldn’t settle on a release date. And, though he’d overcome his stage jitters long enough to complete a sold-out concert tour in Europe, he had a history of cancelling shows. “I’m starting to get that feeling that I got in 2001, 2002,” Questlove said, “where I physically had to step away and let him fight his own demons, no matter how hard it was to watch.” He sighed. “I feel like I’m forcing him to do something he doesn’t want to do. It’s, like, ‘Go over there and sit in that chair. I’m going to pull out all your teeth.’ ”

Being America’s bandleader can be rough work. Questlove often thinks about an exchange he had last year with the singer Amy Winehouse. The two of them had been trading MP3s and hatching plans for a supergroup that would include the rapper Mos Def and the guitarist and singer Raphael Saadiq. But he missed a Skype call from her one night, when he was packing for a trip to Sweden, and by the time his flight landed she was gone—three empty bottles of vodka in her bedroom. It was a familiar story, in his death- and addiction-haunted business, but it was the opposite of his own. “Hip-hop saved my life,” he said.

The first time we met, Questlove took me to see the house where he grew up, at 5212 Osage Avenue, in West Philadelphia. It was in a row of skinny brick houses, their porches roofed in tarpaper, that leaned against one another along a one-way street. The windows looked out on a huge public school, surrounded by a chain-link fence and asphalt playgrounds. When his parents moved there, in the early sixties, the neighborhood was solidly middle class. His father, Lee Andrews, had been one of the great doo-wop singers of the nineteen-fifties, whose silken tenor floated through classics like “Teardrops” and “Long Lonely Nights.” His mother, Jacqui Thompson, was a print model, singer, and former dancer from Pittsburgh. Together, they opened a boutique on Fifty-second Street, called Klothes Kloset, that catered to a racially mixed clientele eager to see the latest fashions from New York. Some were so well to do that they came by chauffeured limousine.

It didn’t last long. “Everything changed after April, 1968,” Questlove told me. “There was just this general feeling in America that ‘Shit, they done killed Martin Luther King. There is some unspoken payback about to happen.’ ” By the early seventies, the neighborhood had become a seedbed for gangs, the drug trade, and black liberationists. MOVE, the radical Afrocentric group, was founded in West Philadelphia in 1972, and occupied a row house about a mile down Osage Avenue. By then, the boutique had closed, its customers having long since escaped to the suburbs.

“Take all the kids that I grew up with between Forty-ninth Street and Fifty-second Street,” Questlove said, as we drove past the weedy sidewalks along Malcolm X Park, the dilapidated stores on Fifty-second Street. “Put them all in a line. It’s almost as if the Angel of Death said, ‘Of the thirty-three of you, I am only going to spare the lives of three. And of the three of you only one of you is going to be prosperous.’ It’s, like, ‘You going to die, you going to die, you going to jail. Greg, I’m going to spare your life. Ahmir . . . no. . . . O.K., O.K., I’m going to spare you, Ahmir. But you going to die, you going to die, and you going to die.’ ” He’d seen a crack epidemic and several major factories shut down. He’d seen neighborhoods abandoned, buildings condemned, only to be snapped up by developers and resold as million-dollar properties. “I’m not trying to get all conspiracy theory on you,” he said. “But it was almost like a cleansing. It was like someone’s version of a cleansing.”

When he was a young boy, still known as Ahmir, his mother heard him talking to two kids from the neighborhood one day. “It was raining outside, and they were playing in the gutter with little twigs and sticks,” she told me. “I was watching them, and Ahmir said, ‘Have you ever flown to Puerto Rico? Have you ever done so-and-so?’ He’s talking about art and music and jazz, and those two boys, they just look at him and say, ‘What the M.F. are you talking about?’ They’re just cussing him out. It wasn’t the kids’ fault. They may be dead today—I know their parents were drug pushers. But I just looked at Ahmir’s face and I thought, Oh, my God. No way. You will not get my son.”

Music was the family’s fallback. It had pulled Ahmir’s father out of poverty once, and would do so again. Lee Andrews rejoined the oldies circuit in the early seventies, just as shows like “Grease” and “American Graffiti” were sparking a nostalgia craze that would last for more than a decade. “I was kind of born in his second wind,” Questlove told me. His father eventually created his own night-club act—a mixture of doo-wop, disco, and lounge-lizard classics like “Fever,” which his wife sang. In the early days, they would leave Ahmir and his older sister, Dawn, with their grandmother. But Ahmir soon worked his way into the show. “We had a nine-piece band with four horn players,” his mother told me. “So we got Ahmir a toy horn, and when they would move he would move. He’d bring the horn up and do a little step, and put the horn down. People would ask, ‘Is that a little boy, or is it a midget?’ ”

By the age of seven, Ahmir was in charge of his father’s wardrobe—he would brush the suède, iron the handkerchiefs, and polish the shoes. By ten, he was running the lights. “I’d get to the night club early and get on the ladder to place the spots,” he told me. “I had a flip device to operate the stage lights and I knew how to cut gel. I knew that green and purple weren’t good on my dad’s skin, and that pink was good.” By age eleven, he was working as a d.j. as well. “I used to be, like, ‘Mom, did the clubs ever complain that a kid was running the system?’ And she was, like, ‘That was the eighties.’ ”

Back home in Philadelphia between gigs, his parents kept him to a strict schedule. “You had to have your ass in the house by four o’clock,” he remembers. “Not no minute late, not ten minutes late. If ‘Oprah’ came on and you weren’t in the house, you were in trouble.” Once home, he had half an hour or so to unwind in front of the television. Then it was time for homework and dinner, and down to his drum kit in the basement for three to four hours of practice. “I have a passion for music, but I don’t have a passion for drumming,” he says. “Half my motivation was ‘I got to become great so I can get out of this basement!’ It was rat-infested, spider-infested, water-bug-infested. My neighbor, after she discovered what I do now, she was, like, ‘I knew you’d make it, with all that noise.’ ”

Learning to play was only half the point—his father also wanted to keep him off the street, he says. But his mother had grander ambitions. She’d noticed early on that her son had a gift for music—clapping his hands to his ears when someone sang off pitch, correcting the bassist when he played in the wrong time signature. “I know every mother thinks this,” she told me. “But I just knew that Ahmir was a virtuoso genius.” It was she who insisted on enrolling him in a school for the performing arts, and who took him and his sister to museums and symphonies and ballets on the weekends. “Dad’s thing was ‘Just say no,’ ” he told me. “Mom’s thing was ‘I got to give him something to say yes to.’ ”

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It made for an odd upbringing, though he might have turned out a little peculiar anyway. Tall, gawky, and hard to miss because of his hair, he was always attracting the wrong kind of attention—he used to run all his errands in the early morning just to avoid bullies. His love of music bordered on the obsessive. As a two-year-old, he would watch records spin just to memorize the labels. Later, he would count off the seconds to the end of a shower, or the steps to the end of the hall, or try to cross a bridge before the end of a song, walking at a certain number of beats per minute—he could feel the rhythm in everything. He had an unending appetite for pop culture, a prodigious memory for dates, and a compulsion for cross-referencing them. He can tell you, for instance, that Philadelphia police bombed the MOVE headquarters on May 13, 1985; that Tony Orlando guest-starred on “Cosby” that month, and that “Soul Train” was a rerun that week. “I got home the second the bomb dropped,” he says. “That was the day my ninth-grade girlfriend dumped me.”

He was playing drums in his parents’ band by then, and his sister was singing backup. (“The black Partridge Family,” Tariq used to call them.) He’d made his musical début almost by accident, two years earlier, when the band’s regular drummer cancelled at the last moment. As it happened, the show that night was an oldies revue at Radio City Music Hall, but that wasn’t what worried him. “I’ll tell you why I freaked out,” he told me. “The keyboard player was dating Susan from ‘Sesame Street.’ When I saw her backstage, I was having a heart attack. My mom and dad said, ‘Just calm down. You know the show. Do it!’ ” He was twelve years old.

It was close to eleven o’clock when the Roots arrived in Manchester, and Questlove’s relief factor had crept up to thirty. Word had it that D’Angelo was through airport security in Los Angeles; one text message even claimed that he was sitting on a plane. “Now it’s, like, Is the plane in the air?” Questlove said. “And, once he lands, is he going to be ready to play?” The real relief wouldn’t come until three in the morning, on the way home from the show, he said. “It’s not my job to enjoy myself.”

Still, when he walked into the rehearsal room at the local Holiday Inn Express, he couldn’t help but grin. Standing there amid the usual Stonehenge of equipment—the stacks of amplifiers and speakers, guitars and double-tiered keyboards, all spaghettied together with patch cords and cables—were three of his musical heroes. Jesse Johnson, the former lead guitarist for the legendary Minneapolis group the Time, was in one corner, wearing mirror shades and a trenchcoat. Across from him stood Pino Palladino, a gangly Welshman and bassist of surpassing funkiness, who has played with everyone from B. B. King to Paul Simon. Next to Palladino, looking like a middle-aged bank clerk in a dark suit and spectacles, was Eric Leeds, the saxophonist on some of Prince’s greatest records. While they shouted out greetings and gave each other shoulder hugs, Kendra Foster, who used to sing with Parliament-Funkadelic, glided into the room trailing a comet’s tail of reddish-blond curls. “This is like rock-and-roll fantasy camp,” Kirk Douglas muttered.

Douglas is a dazzling guitarist in his own right, and physically striking: he has the polished skin and sculpted cheekbones of an onyx cat. But although he has been with the Roots for nearly a decade, he’s still something of an outsider. While most of the band grew up on the streets of Philadelphia, he was raised in relative comfort on Long Island, the son of a United Nations administrator. While they were listening to Public Enemy, he was listening to Van Halen and Kiss. “I went through my fair share of hazing,” he told me. “I can interpret that as just some Philly shit that I don’t know about, but the good-natured ribbing didn’t feel very good-natured at the time.” The contrast with Jesse Johnson didn’t help matters here. The two stood on opposite sides of the drum kit, like fun-house mirror images: Douglas with a mini-fro teased up in front, Johnson with a full afro; Douglas with a Les Paul dusted with glitter; Johnson with a Stratocaster covered in lush paisley. “He’s got the Jesse Johnson starter kit!” James Poyser, the Roots’ keyboardist, joked. “There’s the before and there’s the after.”

As a bandleader, Questlove is always on the lookout for situations like this—for a chance to throw his players into a lake, as he puts it. “Kirk is a natural-born star,” he told me later. “But he has a tendency to clam up. He couldn’t even talk to Jesse. And when he’s nervous he’ll just start shredding. I want him to shine.” Hip-hop can be a hard sell as live theatre: a rapper shouting over a drum track isn’t much to look at. The Roots sidestep this problem by playing instruments, but Questlove has also never forgotten the stagecraft he learned on the oldies circuit. “I remember my first tour with the Roots, in Japan,” Douglas said. “I’m about to go do a solo when Ahmir calls me over. He says, ‘When you go out there, I want you to give me “Purple Rain.” I want you to give me “Lights, camera, action!” ’ I’m thinking, Whatever I do, I just don’t want to go back to teaching preschool. So I walk on the table. I play slide on my ass. I’m doing the whole Will Ferrell ‘Anchorman’ routine. By the end of the solo, I’m walking back yelling, ‘Is this what you want? Is that what you want?’ ”

The Roots would play two shows that night: a set of their own music and a set with D’Angelo and the others. The D’Angelo show had been billed as a “Super Jam,” but Questlove had no intention of winging it. He had put together a list of thirteen songs—mostly beloved B-sides from the funk and rock catalogue—and grouped them into five medleys. The tunes ranged from “Babies Makin’ Babies,” by Sly and the Family Stone, to “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” by the Beatles, with songs by Funkadelic, David Bowie, and the Ohio Players in between. The shifting meters and segueing styles would have been tricky for any band to negotiate, much less one put together that day. It was the musical equivalent of a triple twisting backflip, thrown into an Olympic dive at the last second, but Questlove liked it that way.

At the other Roots rehearsals I’d seen, if something didn’t sound quite right he would shout out a correction, or stop and sing the right part in a high, husky voice. “Go to a D chord. . . . Take the low note out. . . . No, half a step up. . . . Yeah, yeah!” With his near-perfect pitch and uncanny memory, he seemed to know everyone’s parts better than they did. He was a little more circumspect in this company. “Let’s not treat this as a memorial moment,” he said, when everyone had finished tuning and was huddled up around his drums. “Let’s try to have as much fun as it’s possible to have.” They reached into the circle for a complicated handshake, then he hammered out a pickup beat and they were off.

All they needed now was a singer.

As a boy in his family’s band, Ahmir knew that the cardinal sin was to overplay. His father hated drum fills and solos—James Brown was his role model—and he’d give his son the eye at any hint of unbridled ego. “Don’t be doin’ all that!” he’d shout. “Just keep it in the pocket! Keep it in the pocket!” The lesson sank in. Most jazz drummers want to be Elvin Jones or Tony Williams, the jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter, who played on “Voodoo,” told me. “They just want to do their badass shit. There’s never an empty place in the music, and the time wavers quite dramatically. That’s what’s so cool about Ahmir. He can sit in that pocket and drive it and think in terms of a wider landscape—of gestures that come around over a longer period.”

At fifteen, Ahmir was already a seasoned professional. Yet he spent his high-school years wondering whether he was good enough to play drums at all. This was partly an accident of history. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts was home to an astonishing crop of talent. Ahmir’s class alone included Christian McBride, Joey DeFrancesco, and Kurt Rosenwinkel—arguably the greatest jazz bassist, organist, and guitarist of their generation. As a junior, in the school’s talent show, Ahmir lost to future members of the R. & B. group Boyz II Men. As a senior, he took the jazz singer and future Grammy nominee Amel Larrieux to the prom. “I’ll put it this way,” he told me. “The first month in high school, the principal comes to English class and calls DeFrancesco out of the room. We instantly think, Oh, no, you suspended! But when he comes back Joey’s, like, ‘Kenny Kirkland’s acting up, and Miles is bringing me on tour for three months.’ I was, like, ‘Miles who?,’ and they were, like, ‘Duh! Miles Davis!’ ”

The band room, as he tells it, became a battleground for his musical soul. On one side were McBride and DeFrancesco, players of straight-ahead, traditionalist jazz of the kind championed by Wynton Marsalis. (“We were kind of known as the jazz bullies,” McBride told me, laughing. “We liked to mess with people.”) On the other side was Rosenwinkel, the progressive. “It was sort of like having a gang experience,” Questlove says. “One gang is, like, ‘Yo, don’t even think about talkin’ to us unless you speak our language.’ So now I’ve got to go home and get my chops up, because I don’t know the difference between Elvin Jones and Philly Joe Jones. And then, on the other side, Rosenwinkel is in my head, like, ‘Yo, that’s not the shit you need to be listening to! Here’s some Zappa and here’s some Captain Beefheart and here’s some Mahavishnu.’ ” Ahmir didn’t even like jazz at first. His parents had used it strictly as punishment: “Throw the Prince away and make me listen to ‘Sketches of Spain.’ I’m sitting there, like, ‘Fuck. Every song is nineteen minutes long.’ ” When I asked who finally won his soul, he laughed: “Tariq.”

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They met in the principal’s office in the first week of school. Ahmir had come in to get tokens for the city bus; Tariq was getting suspended—he’d been caught fooling around with a ballet student in the ladies’ room. Although Ahmir was two years older and twice the other boy’s size, it was Tariq who took charge. “No freshman had ever established their rep that fast,” Questlove recalls. Tariq wore tinted shades and a high-top fade, with intricate shavings on the sides, and was as tightly wound as a magnetic coil. His father had been murdered when he was one; his mother was knifed to death before he graduated. While Ahmir had spent his life in the fortress of 5212 Osage Avenue—his father kept a padlock on the front gate—Tariq had been working the street since second grade. “I was a man of many hustles,” he told me. “I sold crack cocaine. I sold soft pretzels. I made handcrafted medallions and sold multicolored stopwatches. Then I flipped my money and made more.”

The first thing that caught his eye was Ahmir’s jacket: thrift-store denim with a hand-painted peace sign on the back. This was 1987. Prince had just been through his psychedelic phase, and Tariq was enough of a salesman to spot a fashion trend. “I thought it was something that I could incorporate into my hustle,” he says. It was Ahmir’s drumming, though, that kept his attention. Although Tariq had come to the school as a visual artist, he’d been composing rhymes since he was nine years old. “I’m a hipper hopper / never stopper / rockin’ all around the clocker,” the first one began. The rhythm track was all in his head; he’d never had a drum machine—that would be Ahmir. “All of a sudden, I have this thug-ass art student who’ll only let me sit next to him in the cafeteria if I do break beats for him,” Questlove says.

It began as a kind of novelty act. Tariq and the other kids at the hip-hop table would shout out tunes and Ahmir would play the break beats from the songs they sampled—“God Made Me Funky,” by the Headhunters, say, or “Impeach the President,” by the Honey Drippers. They could almost never stump him. Pretty soon, Tariq was phoning him at home late at night, putting him on three-way calls with his girlfriends or other aspiring m.c.s. “Do ‘Busy Bee’!” he’d yell, while Ahmir ran down to his drums in the basement. “Do ‘Top Billin’ ’!” Other times, Tariq would freestyle verses while Ahmir improvised behind him. Finally, one day, Tariq made an announcement. “You, me—we’re a group,” he said.

When Questlove says that his life was saved by hip-hop—and not by soul or doo-wop or jazz or rock and roll—he means to say that it made sense of everything that came before it. Hip-hop swallowed black music whole. It subsumed every part of its history, then spat it out in samples and rhymes. The references could be sly and subtle—a Coltrane run, a Huey Newton quote—or perfectly explicit. “Came across the oceans in chains and shame / Easing the pain / And it was without name,” Gang Starr rapped, in 1989. “Until some men in New Orleans on Rampart Street / Put out the sounds and then they gave it a beat.” Groups like A Tribe Called Quest seemed to wire together all the loose parts of Ahmir’s musical upbringing—the riffs and record labels, B-sides and backup vocals—and zap them to life. They plugged his obsessions into the street—into the drugs and violence of West Philadelphia, and the friends and neighbors dying even then. “It made me more politically aware,” he says.

The Roots’ first album, “Organix,” was released in 1993, at the tail end of what’s often called the golden age of hip-hop. What began as block-party music in the South Bronx, in the seventies, had become a global phenomenon. Its drumbeats, repurposed from old soul and funk records, had turned into a sound bed for boasts, taunts, and street poetry. It was a fiercely insular music at first—groups like De La Soul were still catching hell in the late eighties for drawing white crowds, Questlove recalls—and then merely fierce. By the early nineties, the newly accurate SoundScan system, which tracked album purchases at their point of sale, showed that hip-hop was more popular than anyone had imagined, with the opposite of its perceived audience. (Seventy to seventy-five per cent of hip-hip is bought by white consumers, the Brown sociologist Tricia Rose notes in her book “The Hip Hop Wars.”) Crossover was suddenly the definition of success, and what the people wanted was gangsta rap.

The Roots always ran counter to this trend. At first, they were just too nerdy to be gangsta. Ahmir, who’d been raised Baptist, didn’t like to record curse words, for fear of offending his mother. And Tariq, despite his hard-knock history (or perhaps because of it), was prone to abstraction: his previous name for the group was the Square Roots. “He had a song called ‘The Anti-Circle,’ ” Richard Nichols, their manager, recalls. “I’m taking it around to folks, and they’re, like, ‘What the hell is this? Some freestyle rappin’?’ I thought it was cool. But it was no ‘life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money.’ ”

As a live act, the Roots soon built a following in Philadelphia, setting up on street corners and having Tariq take on all comers in rapping contests. But on records they took a while to catch on. Ahmir’s beats could sound less crisp and hard-hitting than a drum machine, and his samples were a little odd: funk bands like Faze-O and Surprize; R. & B. singers like Peabo Bryson. At one point, Nichols recalls, he and Tariq were at a night club in North Carolina when the d.j. put on a Roots song. “The floor just starts clearing out. There was one girl who tried to dance to it maybe for forty-five seconds and then she walked off. Tariq just looked at me. He was, like, ‘We’re going to fucking fail.’ ”

They stuck with it. Ahmir, who’d been accepted to Juilliard but couldn’t afford to go, instead learned to mimic a machine’s flat, jackhammer attack. Tariq, rather than just rapping over the beat, took a more active role in shaping the songs. They brought in beatboxers, guest rappers, a tuba player, and a succession of bassists. They wrote songs with Common, Q-Tip, Jill Scott, and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Yet the albums were unmistakably their own. They could move seamlessly from jazz to rap to neo-soul, from mere grievance to something keener and more double-edged. “Things Fall Apart,” in 1999, had a black woman fleeing white police on its cover. “Game Theory,” seven years later, had a crude sketch of a lynching—or was it a suicide? “Rising Down,” in 2008, had a Devil in blackface descending on a white village. “Get treated like a criminal if crime is all you know / Get greeted like a nigga if a nigga’s all you show,” Tariq rapped. “My city’s like an island where you can’t find a boat.”

Whenever the Roots finish mastering a record, Questlove likes to take it out for a “car test”—to listen to it as a buyer might, while cruising through Philadelphia late at night. His vehicle of choice for this is a Scion, a car so small and perversely proportioned that he looks like a circus clown sitting in it, his hair barely clearing the ceiling. “My management was, like, ‘Yo, dude, why don’t you just get an S.U.V.? It’s spacious, and you can get your drums inside.’ But when I grew up, in the eighties, when you saw a black guy in a Jeep or a BMW or a Mercedes, that meant he was a drug dealer.”

Sometimes, though, there’s no right car for a black man to drive. In 2010, when Questlove was test-driving the Roots’ ninth album, “How I Got Over,” he was stopped by police three times in two hours. It was three o’clock on a Sunday morning, he recalls, and the streets of Philadelphia were deserted. “When the last guy stopped me, I was, like, ‘Listen, I just got to ask: What’s happening? Is something wrong with my tail-light? Is there some grand-theft-auto happening tonight?” The policeman shook his head. “No, man, you have to understand,” he said. “You’re driving the wrong car. If you were driving an S.U.V., they would have thought you were one of the Eagles. But in this car they think you must have taken it off a college student.”

People often ask why the Roots’ albums have taken such a bleak turn, Questlove said, but the answer is all around them. When the band was making “Game Theory” and “Rising Down,” he recalls, there were sometimes more than a dozen murders a week in Philadelphia: “It was, like, Whoa, we’ve got to let the world know about this.”

How best to do that—how to reach a large audience while telling them what they don’t want to hear—has been the central conundrum for the Roots, and they try to solve it in different ways. “I want to be universal,” Tariq told me. But to Questlove the two of them have always spoken to different constituencies. “The Roots are the pendulum swing of my left-centricity and Tariq’s straight-ahead theory,” he says. “Tariq has the barbershop in mind. ‘Can I play this with a straight face in front of the guys?’ I’m thinking about Slate and Pitchfork—all the stuff that Tariq doesn’t give a fuck about. I’m looking at Tariq: Fucking barbershop! They’re still busy arguing about Jay-Z, Biggie, or Nas. He’s trying to please a demographic that ignores him. I’m trying to please a demographic that’s hard to please. That has always been the story of the Roots.”

The results tend to play better on Slate than in the barbershop. The Roots have won four Grammy Awards and earned eleven nominations, and their Metacritic rating—a scored average of reviews from dozens of sources—hovers in the low eighties. That’s an impressive number, as Questlove is quick to point out, especially after fourteen albums. (Radiohead averages seventy-eight, Madonna seventy-two, Beyoncé sixty-seven.) Yet the Roots have never had a No. 1 hit or a platinum record. And they’ve never recorded a song that sticks in the mind or defines its cultural moment as indelibly as Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” or Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” The closest they’ve come to this is “You Got Me,” which was co-written by Jill Scott and sung by Erykah Badu. “The Roots are not a singles band,” Robert Christgau says. “They’re an albums band. Yeah, it’s a problem. Hip-hop is the great singles music of the post-punk era, and they don’t do that. They’re about endurance, wisdom—not things that hip-hop is especially good at.”

Questlove used to complain about the lack of a “Bentley moment” in his career—one life-changing hit that would send him driving around town in a top hat and tuxedo. But he now thinks that that may be for the best. “It’s like ‘The Matrix’: the red pill and the blue pill,” he says. “The red pill is: By your second album, I will let you go sixteen times platinum. I’ll let you win the Album of the Year Grammy and all those rock-star trappings you ever wanted—friends with every actor and notable musician and model. Or the blue pill, which is: You will never have a Bentley moment. But I’m going to make sure that you have twenty-plus albums, a relevant career, respect, and dignity.” The blue pill is the better option, he said, but he would have picked the red until recently. “I remember moments where I damn near had a breakdown. Why am I working my ass off for people to ignore us? It just seemed hopeless—like I was going on just to pay my gas bills.”

By the spring of 2008, the strain was beginning to show. He and Tariq had been best friends once; now they rode in separate tour buses—he dubbed his Gryffindor and Tariq’s Slytherin. (“I’m not familiar with any of that shit,” Tariq says. “I don’t watch ‘Harry Potter.’ ”) The economy was in crisis, the music industry was collapsing, and album and ticket sales were down everywhere. Most of the Roots now had wives and children, yet to stay afloat they could never stop touring. “I remember we did a show in L.A.,” Richard Nichols told me. “This place held three thousand people and, like, six hundred showed up. And everybody’s shows were that way. People were scared out of their wits.”

That was when he returned Jimmy Fallon’s call.

“Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” is taped five days a week, forty weeks a year, on the sixth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The Roots rehearse just around the corner from the soundstage, in a tiny suite that feels more like a railroad cabin. Like the rest of the floor, their rooms are kept at a chilly sixty-seven degrees—“Cold, but not Letterman cold,” as Questlove puts it. “He keeps his whole building at sixty-four.” (Letterman says that this keeps the comedy fresh, Paul Shaffer told me; Fallon says that it just keeps him from sweating.) The only exception is when Aretha Franklin is performing. Her contract stipulates that the air-conditioning be turned off by 2 A.M. on the day of the taping. “We actually have an Aretha outfit,” Questlove said. “After her third appearance, we went down to wardrobe and said we’re not wearing wool anymore.”

The first time I visited, I found Questlove wedged into a closet-size room surrounded by his drum kit and hunched over a laptop, like an astronaut in a flight pod. On a screen on the wall in front of him, men in flared slacks and platform shoes shimmied next to ladies in chiffon dresses and big bangle earrings. “I’ve got ‘Soul Train’ on constant loop,” he said. “That’s my version of a window.” Through a half-open door, the rest of the band sat slouched on stools, noodling on instruments and awaiting his instructions. One of them had tacked a publicity shot of a middle-aged funk band on the wall, next to a Malcolm X puppet and a Michelle Obama doll in its original packaging. The handwritten caption read, “The Roots in ten years, after they’ve added a white girl like the Black Eyed Peas.” Someone had crossed out the ten and written an eight above it.

It was an hour till taping, and they still had some sandwiches and walkovers to learn. Questlove pulled up a J Dilla recording and played a snippet over the speakers. The band was just starting to play it back when the percussionist, Frank Knuckles, came bounding in wearing a barber’s cape from the hair stylist, bits of shaving cream on his chin. He grabbed his drumsticks and picked up the beat. Sandwiches, or bumpers, are the musical segues between commercials and talk-show segments—the sonic filler between slices of disparate media. Questlove mostly lifts them from old soul records, though anything is fair game—funk, jazz, sitcom themes. They’re heard for only a few seconds on the air but have to last three to four minutes for the live audience. The Roots have recorded more than twenty-seven hundred in the past three years.

Walkovers are the short fanfares that welcome guests onto the set. On most talk shows, the bandleader writes a single theme that gets used over and over, reaping royalties every time. But the Roots, taking a cue from Paul Shaffer (“The king of the walkover,” Questlove calls him), play a different theme for each guest. When Elvis Costello came on the show, they played a jingle that Costello’s father had written for British television. For Jason Bateman, it was a tune by the Dregs of Humanity, a fake band from one of Bateman’s first sitcoms. Questlove likes nothing better than to catch guests off guard with their own memories, like a detective pulling a faded photograph from his pocket. And he sometimes resorts to more barbed commentary. When Ashlee Simpson came on the show a couple of years after being caught lip-synching on “Saturday Night Live,” the Roots played a song by Milli Vanilli, another notorious lip-synching act. When Michele Bachmann was a guest, last November, her walkover was a Fishbone song called “Lyin’ Ass Bitch.”

The furor that followed the Bachmann incident reminded the Roots of the tightrope they’d been on all along. When they first joined the show, some fans accused them of selling out, while the network worried that they might be hard to manage. “The job of the band was always about ‘Be there, play the theme song, and shut up,’ ” Questlove says. “But you’re talking about the Roots, and we won’t shut up.” Fallon was an old fan and understood their ability from the start—“The Roots are the most talented humans on the face of the earth,” he likes to say. But others thought that the band might not have enough musical range. At one point, Questlove says, the producers asked them to play an Andrew Lloyd Webber song, half expecting them to fail. “Jimmy tends to get overexcited about a lot of things,” Lorne Michaels, the executive producer, told him.

The band practiced more in those first three months than it had in the previous six years, Kirk Douglas recalls: “Failure was not an option.” Fallon says that the Roots earned their keep fairly quickly. But, to Questlove, by the second week of taping there was a do-or-die atmosphere on the set: “They were watching the feeds in L.A.; they were watching the feeds in New York.” Fortunately, the writers chose that day to introduce a new segment, called “Freestylin’ with the Roots.” This was a kind of improv routine: Fallon would interview audience members, and the Roots would turn the answers into songs, with Tariq composing rhymes on the spot. For an added twist, the band had to play in styles of Fallon’s choosing—in this case, rap, heavy metal, and country.

It was a game that no other band in the world could play so well. By the end, Tariq was crooning couplets in a Southern twang while Douglas imitated a pedal steel guitar behind him: “She was in the seventh row / At the Jimmy Fallon show / With a headband on her head . . .” “Freestylin’ with the Roots” has since become a mainstay of the show, with the band doubling as everyone from U2 to Georges Bizet. “There was never a question that we were ready for our closeup,” Questlove told me. “I always knew that if you throw a Broadway reference at me—‘Pippin’ or ‘West Side Story’ or ‘In the Heights’—I’m going to catch it. If you throw any children’s show at me—‘Zoom,’ ‘Electric Company,’ ‘Sesame Street’—I’m going to catch it. If you throw garage rock, yacht rock, disco, soul—I’m going to catch it. It was just a question of whether we were going to get the chance.”

The Roots have long since settled into an easy working rhythm on the show. They arrive between eleven and one, tape from five-thirty to six-thirty, and usually leave by seven or eight. The guests one summer evening included the model Kate Upton and the actor LeVar Burton. (They walked in to “Uptown Girl” and the theme from “Roots.”) Burton talked about his youth-reading initiative; Upton did the “Cat Daddy” dance. In between came a bit called “Fifty Shades of Grey Karaoke,” in which the Roots played tinkly love ballads while audience members sang lines written by “the erotic smut-peddler E. L. James,” as Fallon put it. One large man in a lumberjack shirt bellowed for a while about rubbing baby oil on a woman’s behind.

It was a typical night. The Fallon show isn’t so much a takeoff on silly, summer-camp skit comedy as it is the thing itself. Yet its giddy good nature can be infectious, and it has the best live music on television. Fallon and his music booker, Jonathan Cohen, have brought in a dizzying variety of acts—Beyoncé, Bon Iver, Sonic Youth, Air Supply, Bruce Springsteen, Wu-Tang Clan, Megadeth, and the Muppets, among hundreds of others. And many of them will never again sound as good as they did playing with the Roots. Fallon describes his set as a tiny cubbyhole of joy and fun, and the atmosphere has clearly rubbed off on the band. “This is a show that turns us all into twelve-year-olds,” Questlove told me.

The band will always have a somewhat divided nature—by force of habit as much as by temperament. Questlove plays the aesthete, Tariq the street tough; Questlove the perfectionist, Tariq the freestyler; Questlove drives the Scion, Tariq the Porsche. (Although, as Tariq points out, Questlove is just as likely to be driven around in a Mercedes limousine these days.) Before the Roots’ first set at Bonnaroo, when they were in their trailer waiting to go onstage, Questlove sat in the vestibule giving interviews, while the others smoked and drank to pounding music in the next room. “Gryffindor,” Questlove said, pointing to his couch, then jerked his thumb at the door: “Slytherin.” He grinned. “When you hear Kirk singing harmony, you know he’s gone over to the other side.”

Still, the Fallon show has forced them to make common cause again. In the old days, when someone messed up onstage, Questlove would hit a special “demerit” snare to let him know that he knew. Now the whole band uses secret codes to joke around on the set. “If I drop a stick, James will play a chromatic chord or a major seventh—like an old lady at a church organ,” Questlove said. “And, if I want to make fun of somebody, there is a rhythm I can play. Each person has his way of talking.” It’s a habit that Questlove picked up on tour with the Dave Matthews Band. When he’d play drums with them on the encores, he’d hear Matthews talking to his bandmates over their earbuds, pointing out funny things in the crowd: “Fourth row, left side: that guy is about to take a tumble . . . ooh.” Questlove had used the same system to count out beats and bark instructions, but to Matthews it was just an excuse to make jokes. “I was, like, ‘That’s what you guys talk about?’ And he said, ‘Man, if you want to survive, it has to be fun.’ ”

What’s not clear is how the band’s good fortune will affect their art. Black music has always thrived in adversity, Questlove once told the writer Touré. The worse the social conditions, the better it gets: gospel came out of slavery, the blues out of the Great Depression, soul and doo-wop out of the civil-rights movement. “Hopelessness brings the best of art,” he said. Before Fallon, Questlove used to worry that his music was respected but not loved. Now he worries about the opposite. “I’m resigned to the fact that I’m going to walk through life and people are going to say, ‘Oh, you’re the guy in that Jay-Z video!’ Or ‘Oh, my God, you’re the guy in “Yo Gabba Gabba!” ’ ” he told me. “I’m going to get the love, but I’m not going to get it for the thing I wanted.”

He was a teen-ager at the right time, he said, when hip-hop seemed to be igniting a social movement. He felt as if he were part of a long lineage in those days—Malcolm X had passed the baton to James Brown, who passed it to Sly Stone and Funkadelic, who handed it to Public Enemy and A Tribe Called Quest, who handed it to the Roots and others. But hard times, he now thinks, only bring out the best in art when artists have nothing to lose. “Hip-hop, in its thirty-fifth professional year, has turned into the very thing it was once against,” he said. “The period of ‘I’m struggling but I’m dreaming big, and I’m going to achieve something’ morphed into ‘I made it, and y’all didn’t help me, so fuck y’all,’ which turned into ‘I’ve got everything I want, and you don’t have it,’ which turned into ‘I’m the shit, and you ain’t shit.’ So all the haves were champions and all the have-nots were tossed aside like yesterday’s news.”

Fame has yet to take the edge off Questlove’s activism. Since joining Fallon, he has campaigned for Barack Obama, tweeted tirelessly about liberal causes—he has more than two million followers—and was briefly known as the Paul Revere of Occupy Wall Street. (When he noticed police gathering on South Street near Zuccotti Park, last November, he wrote, “Somethin bout to go down yo, swear I counted 1000 riot gear cops bout to pull sneak attack #carefulyall.”) Yet the Fallon show has also made him wealthy, with as much to lose as anyone: houses in Philadelphia and a high-rise apartment overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, warehouses full of records, and whole rooms devoted to his sneaker collection—enough to wear a different pair every day for seven years.

“I live this whole ‘Boy in the Plastic Bubble’ existence right now,” he said. “I got to go outside. I don’t want to go outside. It’s safe in here.” Sometimes, these days, he feels a queasy mixture of relief and regret, knowing that he could walk away from music any time and perhaps be all the better for it. He’d still have comedy and food ventures and a book deal and teaching options. He’d still be known as the kinder, gentler hip-hop artist. “That’s the irony of it all,” he said. “Hip-hop has to literally go through hell and crawl through a sewer on its belly like ‘The Shawshank Redemption,’ just so that I can come out smelling like a rose.”

The stage at Bonnaroo looked out on a sea of dazed, upturned faces, pummelled into happy submission by hip-hop. Now and again, early in the evening, someone would light a fire balloon and loft it into the air. It would drift past the camera cranes and lighting rigs, the Ferris wheel and candy-colored booths, catch an updraft above the encircling forest, and flicker out among the clouds. The first stars were visible by then, the temperature in the low seventies, and a great wave of fellow feeling seemed to sweep over the place—a sudden conviction that society could be rebuilt in a day and live in perfect peace, if only there were enough Porta Potties.

By midnight, when the Super Jam began, Questlove’s relief factor was at eighty-nine and rising. D’Angelo had landed in Nashville a few hours early, and arrived at the Roots’ rehearsal space with two hours to spare. He looked roguishly fit, for all the rumors of his decline: goatee and jean jacket, dog tags and do-rag. He made his way around the room, clutching each player hard and then stepping away, as skittish as a stray cat. (I’d been told to stay in the corner, out of his line of sight.) The set list started slow and gradually gained speed, but Questlove decided to rehearse it in reverse order to keep the singer’s confidence up. This seemed to work: D’Angelo’s voice grew stronger with each song. “Oh, God. O.K.,” Questlove said. “This thing is really going to happen.”

As the band made its way to the stage, Jesse Johnson passed the word that Questlove might call an audible that night. (“What’s an audible?” the Welshman Pino Palladino wondered. “You know, like in football,” Johnson told him. “He might change the play.”) Questlove had always hoped that this show would offer more than just cover tunes—that it could give the audience a glimpse into D’Angelo’s creative process: how a song like “Chicken Grease,” on “Voodoo,” could grow out of Curtis Mayfield’s “Mother’s Son” when the right musicians were playing. “I want to re-create that magic,” he’d told me.

At first, this seemed like too much to ask. D’Angelo kept glancing at his lyric sheets onstage, and in the moody opening number—Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland”—he sounded a little unmoored, his falsetto trailing in the air. But then, slowly, the band found its footing. The bass and the drums fell into step and the rhythm section began to stretch and flex, like some great beast stirring. With Kendra Foster wailing harmonies beside him, D’Angelo seemed to take courage in the sound of his own voice. And soon Captain Kirk—his nerves soothed, perhaps, by time spent in the Slytherin room—was sliding across the stage on his knees while Eric Leeds’s saxophone screamed above him.

By the end of the set, D’Angelo was the one calling out audibles, milking “My Summertime Thang” for more than a dozen choruses. He jabbed his fingers in the air once, twice, for the number of downbeats he wanted, then switched the rhythm up and did it again. “I was about to have muscle spasms,” Questlove told me later. “It was, like, dude, you were the one who couldn’t get enough.”

Afterward, when Questlove had left the stage, shouting, “You were there! You saw it!”; when Jesse Johnson had taken off his shades and said, “That shit was funky!,” grinning for the first time that I could remember; when D’Angelo had waved me off with a wary smile and the Roots had clambered into their van for the long drive back to Nashville, Questlove slumped in the front seat and turned on the stereo. “I wouldn’t mind some silence right now,” someone muttered. But he just needed a couple of minutes to wind down. As the song came on—a soul ballad from the seventies by D. J. Rogers—I asked if the concert had been all that he had hoped. He shrugged. “Yeah, but I’m a cat with no expectations,” he said. Then he turned up the volume and fixed his eyes on the road. “Say you love me,” Rogers was singing. “Say, say, say you love me.” ♦

Burkhard Bilger published his first piece in The New Yorker in 2000 and became a staff writer the following year.